For those who have the same warped sense of humour this Letter can also be had in French.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Noseweek exposes Dearjon Letter

Dear Ray Hartley Editor of the Sunday Times,

As you probably know by now Noseweek,
South Africa’s only investigative magazine, has published a
slightly shortened version of this letter in its May
edition. But Ithought you would like
to read the original. So here it is.

* *
* *

It’s deplorable the
way your paper has been promoting crooks for years. This is especially so as
the Sunday Times likes to brag that its team of investigative reporters are
there to do just the opposite.

Do you know what I’m talking about?
Well you should if you watched Carte Blanche’s
expose` on TV the other night.

Cholwich

It was about the
activities of two wide boysKevin CholwichandFrancois Buys.They were
saidto have defrauded a host of people out of a total of more than R100-million over the
last few years with a variety of scams.

But where the Sunday
Times comes in was that two of their companies that were mentioned were Whoopee and Geo Connect.

Buys

So what, you might ask? What’s that got to do with a paper that is believed byover 3-million readers
a week?

The answer is that you have been
carrying Whoopee andGeo Connect advertisements and various other suspect ones that promote
get-rich-quick schemes.

And all my efforts to get you to
stop have come to nothing.

"We can’t be expected to check every ad that appears in the paper," you could argue. "That’s why we
specifically warninvestors to be careful where
they put their money."

Sorry that won’t wash in this case. I have been
campaigning for more than three years to get your paper to stop these ads because
they could harm a lot of people, particularly pensioners and those who can
least afford to lose their savings.

I first complained to Thabo Leshilo in 2009 shortly
after he had been appointed the Public Editor
for the Avusa Group (Sunday
Times, The Times, Sowetan etc). This Harvard
educated, former editor of several Avusa papers,
was billed as the Group Ombudsman.

He apparently agreed with me judging by
the story he wrote in the Sunday Times headed Taking a stand on
unsavoury adverts. The report
mentioned my name and implied that something was going to be done to ensure
this kind of advertising no longer appeared.

As he put it ads, "like the rest of the paper had to bebelievable."

Tragically
it didn’t take long for your paper to revert back to its old ways. So I
complained to the Press Council that it had not
kept its word, but Thabo claimed to have no
knowledge of the article. Unfortunately I had not kept a copy and it was
nowhere to be found on the internet, so my complaint was dismissed.

At one stage I accused him of being a
window dressing appointment who had not been given the power to deal with
complaints effectively. He replied that
he had been "agonising
over this."Soon afterwards he disappeared without a trace and even Googlestill says he has the same job.

The ads carried on appearing and I
continued to complain.

Thabo
was succeeded, as you know, by veteran newsman Joe
Latakgomo, who has an equally impressive pedigree. In the early days of
his tenure he got upset with me because he felt I had accused him of being
another lame ombudsman.

But his subsequent reports in the Sunday Times and The Times
have given little indication that he is anything other than a run of the mill
columnist. I have only seen one that dealt with a specific complaint and that
was mine. And even then he made no definite finding.

In September
last year he wrote an article headed Beware of dubious advertising claims.And onceagain it looked as though your paper was finally going
to stop aiding crooks.

Joe told
us that these come-ons "eroded the public’s trust innewspapers"and that "false
advertising, or advertising that makesclaims
which are patently exaggerated, impacts on consumer confidence."

Then
he gave us this assurance: "We will continue asjournalists
to expose those who cheat and lie to our readers."

Not only were these two scamsters
not exposed in your paper, even though their dubious history of some 10 years or more
was there for all to see on the internet, but the dicey ads continued.

Now Carte
Blanche has revealed that both Whoopee
and Geo Connect were some of the many creations
of the Cholwich-Buys team and people who
invested in them lost the lot. So much for their money back guarantees given in your
paper.

One investor was Veronica
Diedricks, a 47 year old former Telkom
project manager who lives in Krugersdorp. This
mother of two teenage boys put her entire pension payment of R250 000 that she had accumulated after 10 years of hard graft into Whoopee.

She left Telkom
because of white and black racial issues which meant the whites had little
prospect of promotion and is now a contract worker for Nokia
Siemens where she is "veryhappy." Her husband was retrenched and as neither of them gets a pension they
were relying on the Whoopee investment to
improve their lives.

Like many others she is not shouting whoopee, I can tell you. "Nowmoney in my house is
very scarce," she told me.

This was supposed to be a website linked to a
call centre to enable people to advertise their businesses at a monthly fee.
The men then took huge amounts for the privilege of becoming a licence holderin the scheme.

Diedricks was promised R60 000
a month after 15 months, but all she got were a
few payments of R28and then last March a letter arrived saying the business had run out
of money and was closing.

It had raked in R8-million.

Buys appeared on the TV show
in tears as the duped partner who admitted very little. Cholwich was invited to give his side, but never did.

Both men are unrehabilitated insolvents,
who get people to front for them as directors of the companies. They have been
going from one failed business to the next. Other names they have used include The Bare Essence,Phone Petrol, Prepaid Online, Duo Dial, Free Talk, Money Call, Dynamic Life and Xtreme Telecoms (its ads also appeared in the Sunday Times).

A disgruntled former director has created
a website for the sole purpose of warning
people against the business practices of the two men.

It claims that the motto they live by
is "Fake it till
you makeit",and they certainly seem
to have done that.

The site, that includes pictures of
theses smooth talkers, invites people to join its Justice 101 campaign to try and
ensure that these con-men get what they deserve in a criminal court.

I hope that you and
your paper are proud of having helped them to fleece so many people, because
without the huge exposure that the Sunday Times gave them,
I doubt whether they would have left such a long trail of desperate, poverty
stricken pensioners and bread winners in their wake.

P.S. It’s not too late
to give these two gentlemen the usual treatment that you meet out to corrupt Government officials and
other individuals. The question is:"Are you man
enough to doit?"* * * *When I told Bokkie Gerber, Editor of Rapport, South Africa's Afrikaans national Sundaypaper to look a this post as it applied equally to his paper he replied:"Thanks. Thesekind of ads are a big concern. I have asked our ads department to take extra care to screen ads and not accept those with dodgy promises." His approach was totally different to that of the Sunday Times where no Editor ever admitted to me that there was anything wrong during my three year campaign to get the paper to stop taking these ads.

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About Me

I was born in South Africa just before the Boer War whenever that was?
Started life with a golden spoon in my mouth which made eating rather difficult as a result I was under nourished as a child.
Went to a posh school where I only got moved up a class when my old man donated another sight screen for the cricket pitch.
Career prospects were dismal and I was once turned down for a job in the London sewers. "Too highly qualified;"that’s what they said.
I became a journalist when the Police Force wouldn’t have me.
Like most journos I know nothing about everything but I still write about it.
I decided to have my own blog so I wouldn't have to drink with the editor for hours on end to get my stuff published when according to my independent assessment it’s always of great news value.
My religious beliefs are: You only die once so remember, "You can’t be serious and Have Fun."
NEWS FLASH: I've just been appointed the Poor Man's Press Ombudsman by Presidential Decree (Not to be confused with the PRESS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA'S, SA Press Ombudsman)